Big surge
Trump is bragging about…New Zealand?
Donald Trump has called out New Zealand for its recent Covid-19 outbreak, saying the places the world hailed as a success story is now facing a “big surge” in cases.
“The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!’.
“Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something,” the US president said at a campaign rally in Mankato, Minnesota.
That’s why they did it?
Of course the US has a lot more people. New Zealand has 4.8 million, the US has 328 million. The US would have to have around 600 new cases today to match New Zealand’s 9 but of course it has only…uh…42,000.
Overall 22 people have died from Covid-19 in New Zealand, compared with more than 170,000 in the US, the highest death toll in the world. It accounts for nearly 22% of deaths globally.
Yes but we have 66 times the population! 66 times 22 is…uh…1452.
Slow blinks
Walks away shaking head.
And we have slightly less than 5% of the world’s population. That makes us…better than New Zealand? Trump is as innumerate as he is illiterate.
And in response, New Zealand has locked down their largest city, and the PM has agreed to opposition demands to delay the elections. (The latter isn’t possible here, but the president could be working to take steps to ensure a fair and accurate vote. If that were what he wanted.)
WaM notes quite correctly that we have locked down our largest city (stay at home except for food shopping, medical and essential workers). Restaurants, hair dressers, general retail – everything except essential services are closed. Travel outside the region is not permitted. Masks must be worn. Those testing positive and their immediate families are being moved to quarantine facilities. The entire rest of the country is being asked to track movements using a Government App (business MUST display a QR code), maintain separation and public events are restricted to no more than 100 people.
All this for a small outbreak.
The concern we have is that we had gone 102 days without any community transmission. The appearance of a new cluster has not been linked back (yet) to a border failure. The genomic testing suggests a different source than any known in NZ or in managed isolation at the border, but appears related to current strains in both Australia and the UK. Our response is designed to eliminate – again.
Sounds like there might be other ways than human contact to spread and there are non human refuges available. Sounds like something good to know, thank you NZ.
@#2:
I’m not so sure of that. Someone some time ago said that he was a genius.(I forget who, but I’m sure it will come back to me.) Insisted on it. So perhaps a genius can be illiterate, and maybe still counting on his fingers. But both? At the same time? In the same individual?
The laws of probability I would think would be dead-set against it.
Mike, the Health Dept seem not be certain so far. They’re checking surface contamination on refrigerated goods at the cool store patient zero for this cluster worked at, but that seems like a long shot. My guess is, and it’s only a guess, that they will eventually find a link back to the boarder. There are many people who work at ports and airports in various occupations. They come into contact with crews from ship and aircraft. It seems more likely that a low risk encounter has resulted in transfer than some weird mechanism to get a strain from the UK or Australia into the centre of South Auckland that we have not previously had in this country.
Either way Rob it’s good data that’s only possible to shake out when you have a clean lab or as close to one as you can get.
Seems to me if he worked at a store, it might be difficult to trace back…retail workers encounter so many people every day.
Cool store, as in refrigerated warehouse. :-)
Okay. I guess here we call that cold storage, so I sort of thought a cold store might be like our convenience stores, where they have all these refrigerated drinks and stuff. Thanks for clearing that up.